The room turns into a museum of moods and wax figures frozen in memories as she tries in vain to sculpt that naïve smile into her own face. But the clay has already hardened, and her thumbs can’t smooth the creases or reshape the lines. Her portrait is not what she’d dreamed of putting on display.
A trial by fire in the unforgiving kiln cements these features into a shell with a road map of cracks caused by wrong turns and dead ends. She traces these routes with one finger. In the silence, even her heartbeat is out of tune.
Perhaps she’d already been shattered and put back together.
written 09.25.2019
I'm an award-winning fantasy author, artist, and photographer from La Porte, Indiana. My poetry, short fiction, and memoir works have been featured in various anthologies and journals since 2005, and several of my poems are available in the Indiana Poetry Archives. The first three novels in my Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms series have received awards from Literary Titan.
After some time working as a freelance writer, I was shocked by how many website articles are actually written by paid "ghost writers" but published under the byline of a different author. It was a jolt seeing my articles presented as if they were written by a high-profile CEO or an industry expert with decades of experience. I'll be honest; it felt slimy and dishonest. I had none of the credentials readers assumed the author of the article actually had. Ghost writing is a perfectly legal, astonishingly common practice, and now, AI has entered the playing field to further muddy the waters. It's hard to trust who (or what) actually wrote the content you'll read online these days.
That's not the case here at On The Cobblestone Road. I do not and never will pay a ghost writer, then slap my name on their work as if I'd written it. This website is 100% authentic. No outsourcing. No ghost writing. No AI-generated content. It's just me... as it should be.
If you would like to support my work, check out the Support The Creator page for more information. Thank you for finding my website! 🖤